Desert Rose
by erttheking
Summary: A peek into the life of Rose of Sharon Cassidy before she met the Courier. A look into the life of a bitter woman, who lost everything and is running on borrowed time. (Patreon sponsored one-shot)


Desert Rose

XXXXX

Rose of Sharon Cassidy. It was a funny name. No one else she knew had a name like that. Granted, she didn't know many people. Daddy and Mommy lived with her and a few other people lived in the Courtyard. Aside from them, she only spotted people coming in and out, never staying long. Some came in through the gate that led outside, while others came in from Vault City.

She had wanted to follow them and see where they went. To see if anyone else had a name like hers. Vault City in particular seemed to have a lot of people that wanted to go inside it. But daddy never let her. "It's only for citizens, Cass," he would tell her. "You have to be born inside it. But we're safe here in the Courtyard." When he had told her that, she asked if she could go outside instead. Daddy had gotten very angry then. "No. You're never to leave the Courtyard unless I say so. It's dangerous. Promise me that Cass, promise me now!"

Cassidy had promised, but she didn't understand why. Mommy and Daddy didn't seem to like the Courtyard very much. Every Sunday, a big burly man with a gun would come into Daddy's work and take a lot of Daddy's money. They would shout and sometimes Daddy would put some of the money directly in the man's pocket. He always left smiling, and afterwards Daddy would say words that Mommy told her to never repeat.

She thought they would be happier if they left, and Mommy seemed to agree with her. She had talked to Daddy about leaving one night, just before her seventh birthday, saying that they should go and live in some place called Arroyo. Daddy had said no though, that he couldn't leave his work. He had talked about a lot of things Cassidy didn't understand. Something about "NCR" and "annexation" which had made Mommy mad. He also said something about "Enclave" still being around, but Mommy said that Daddy and Daddy's friend had stopped them. But Daddy had said he wasn't sure.

It had confused Cassidy, but when she had walked into ask, they stopped arguing at once. She asked Daddy the next day why they couldn't go to Arroyo. The big man had just taken a lot of Daddy's money and Daddy had looked tired. He had smiled and said, "We'd have to start all over again Cass. Your mommy's got her caravan and I've got my bar. It's tough here, but we have a life. We'd be throwing it all away if we left. Anyway, things are going to get better soon. Some good men are going to be in charge around here. We may be able to go inside Vault City soon."

Cassidy had been very excited to hear that. "Will there be other kids in there?" she asked. "Kids like me?"

Daddy had ruffled her hair. "Of course there will be."

The old question that she had always wondered came to her. "Do they have names like mine in there? Is there a Lily of…" she paused, trying to think of a name that went with Lily. Daddy laughed.

"No Cass. Your name is one of a kind." She tilted her head to the side, wanting to ask how she had gotten the name. Daddy seemed to know what she was thinking. "You do like your name, don't you?" She nodded at once. Of course she did, it was a very pretty name. Daddy had shown her a picture of a rose once, and she had never seen anything as nice. Although he had gotten very sad when she asked if she could see a real one. She had no idea why though.

"But what does it mean?" she asked.

Daddy ruffled her hair again. "Well, you're named Cassidy after me. My pop named me after a real old comic book that he liked."

Cassidy had gotten excited then. "You mean like Grognak the Barbarian? Or the Adventures of Captain Cosmos?" She thought back to all the comics she had managed to read. She couldn't remember anyone being named after her or Daddy.

But Daddy shook his head. "No Cass. The comic my Daddy liked was an adult only comic. It wasn't for kids. And Rose of Sharon came from a book that I really liked. It's kind of an adult only book too though."

"Can I read them when I'm older?" Cassidy asked. Her mind was racing as she tried to think who her father could've been named after. Maybe a no nonsense sheriff who drove the bad guys out of town. Or maybe a super hero who fought aliens on the moon. She wasn't sure why a comic would be for adults only. Maybe it had more of those words Daddy kept saying when he thought she wasn't around.

"Of course Cass," he said, picking her up and putting her on his lap. She looked around as he did. Daddy's work was a little messy and beaten up, but she liked it that way. It was fun to play in, running around and picking up things that people had dropped. Daddy was particularly happy when she brought him money that people had dropped, but Mommy didn't like that very much.

She snuggled up to Daddy. He always smelled kind of funny, but she didn't mind. He smelled like Daddy.

XXXXX

Cass' chest was on fire. It felt like someone was squeezing her heart tight. It hurt, it hurt so bad that she couldn't help but cry. She didn't know why it was happening. The last thing that she remembered was that her father had been celebrating at his work. The NCR people had come to Vault City and were now running it, five days after her tenth birthday.

She had been sick the pass few days, but was getting better. Daddy had bought some medicine from a lady who had come out from Vault City and was selling it. She had taken a couple and was feeling better for a bit, but then she had started to feel cold and dizzy. Within minutes, her heart had started to hurt and she had collapsed.

What happened after that was a blur. Daddy had picked her up and run towards Vault City. Men with guns at the gate had tried to stop him, but some of the NCR people had shouted at them and made them let him in. For the first time, Cassidy had seen the inside of Vault City. It was much shinier than the Courtyard, and everything was cleaner. The people, the buildings, everything.

She could barely take it in as she was rushed inside a building where she was placed on a table. She had continued to cry as Daddy had yelled at a man in a white coat until the man had taken a mask and pressed it over her face.

After that, Cass had woken up much latter. She felt very sore, but her heart didn't hurt anymore. Mommy and Daddy were both there, and were happy to see her wake up. Mommy had looked mad at Daddy for something. Daddy said that the lady who had sold him medicine hadn't sold him medicine for sick people. She had given him something called "Buffout" instead. She had asked if Buffout was bad for people. Daddy had said, "Not for most people."

Daddy had then told her that he was sick. Not sick in that he coughed or threw up, but in that there was something wrong with his heart. He had to take a shot to stay healthy and he couldn't take certain pills like Buffout. Daddy looked very upset then, and told her that she was most likely sick in the same way that she was.

Cassidy had been confused. The man in the coat had fixed her, hadn't he? Her heart didn't hurt anymore. Daddy had said that the man in the coat could have fixed her, but didn't. The NCR had made him save her, but they couldn't make him do more than that. He had said something about the "Treaty of annexation" and that fixing her or him would cost more than he and Mommy could afford.

Cass had felt scared and started to cry again. Was she going to die? Daddy had assured her that she wasn't going to die. She could take the same shots that he did and she would be fine. She just had to make sure that she didn't take Buffout, Psycho or Jet. He made her repeat that over and over again until she could remember it all. Buffout, Psycho, and Jet. Buffout, Psycho, and Jet. Buffout, Psycho and Jet.

She had heard of Jet before, because Mommy had gotten very angry about finding one of Daddy's customers trying to sell it. She had told her that it was very dangerous and that she should never try it. She had listened to Mommy and never done anything with it, even when a funny smelling man had offered her some. It didn't sound too hard to not take those drugs, but it was still scary. Her heart had hurt so bad, and she didn't want for it to hurt like that again.

Cass had looked at Daddy and asked if it ever hurt. He had said no. He didn't look her in the eye as he said it.

XXXXX

Cass watched with narrow eyes at the man drinking in the corner. He was putting away more than she liked. Ever since the NCR had annexed Vault City, there had been a massive influx of tourism and trade in the area. The Courtyard had become a city in its own right, with a couple hundred people living there, pushing a thousand. The walls had needed to be expanded three times in Cass' lifetime, with new buildings constantly being put up.

Part of the conditions for the annexation had been massive relaxations of Vault City laws. Taxes on Courtyard residents had been lowered, non-citizens were now allowed into Vault City itself without purchasing a day pass, and live there without passing the citizenship test, and a good portion of the city guard had been replaced by NCR soldiers. Penalties as a whole were much softer now, as no one could now be banished for badmouthing the First Citizen.

Of course, the Vault City council had found their own, dickless ways of keeping their society fairly segregated. Yes, you could go into Vault City itself, but that was only until curfew, which started at 4PM. After that, all non residents had to get back to the Courtyard or be arrested. Of course, the curfew didn't apply at all to the people who actually lived in Vault City itself, go fucking figure.

Living there was an even bigger pain in the ass. It was open to everyone, but only in an extremely technical way. The rent had gone through the roof in recent years, so only the extremely wealthy had a snowball's chance in Hell of being able to afford it. Even though the Courtyard now dwarfed Vault City itself, the best homes and jobs were still inside that gated community.

And while taxes had been cut on the Courtyard, that had been a mixed blessing for people like Cass. Sure, she didn't have to give up half of her earnings at the end of every week, nor did she had to bribe the big guard that she had taken to calling Shit For Brains when he was out of earshot, but she was still just scrapping by. With the Courtyard growing, rich NCR merchants and entrepreneurs had set up shop there, and Cass just couldn't compete. She had lost half of her customers over the past couple of months, and now she was in even worse shape than when she had owed heavy taxes to Vault City.

She continued to eye the man in the back. She was fairly certain that the only reason he wasn't at the shiny new bar, A Firm Stiff One, was that he had been banned from it. He had the look of someone who drank too much and started shit because of it. She knew that look all too well, she saw it every time she looked in the mirror.

Her dad's old joint, the Spittoon, was still running under her management, but barely. People like the bum in the corner were what kept it afloat. They came in, make asses of themselves, but paid their tabs when the time came. And even then they seemed to be trickling in less and less as of late. She knew at least one had killed himself with a shotgun by accident, so maybe relying on drunken idiots to support her livelihood wasn't a very good idea.

The man in the back staggered up front, clumsily dropped a crumpled up ball of bills in front of her, and stumped out the front door. It only took him three tries to get through it. With no enthusiasm at all, Cass began to separate the bills and began to idly count them. The pictures of Aradesh, the founder of the NCR, looked blankly back up at her. Fifty dollars. Fifty short of what she needed.

She stuffed them untidily into a strong box and took one of the bottles from the back shelf. Uncorking it, she took a large gulp and let out a sigh as a pleasant, warm feeling crept through her body. She had been digging into her own stock more than most would've felt was wise. She found it hard to care though. So much of it was just lying around, collecting dust. Might as well drink it. It made things more tolerable, she wasn't selling it, why the fuck not?

After another gulp, she looked at some papers that were lying on the counter. The papers to her mother's caravan. Both her mother and father were no longer in her life now. Her mother because she had died, her father because he was a prick who had wandered off to who knows where. He had only left her two things. The bar and a death sentence.

Fighting through the fog that was starting to settle on her mind, she tried to remember if she had taken her most recent shot. Yes…yes she had. She could remember because that one bitch had tried to murder her husband with a broken bottle and she had had to throw her out. She had taken it just before that. Good.

She grinned wryly as she looked at the papers, not taking them in. Cassidy Caravans. Her mother had always refused to say whether they had been named after her or her father. Either way, she had a hard time feeling ill towards her mother, even if she had named it after the ass fucker that had run off the second she died. Oh God, that had backfired. Now she couldn't help but envision her mother and father in a compromising position. She quickly took another sip.

There was no getting around it, she was deep in the red. The owner of A Firm Stiff One had offered to buy her out on several occasions. To his credit, he wasn't being as asshole about it, and was offering her a damn good deal. A NCR merchant before him had offered her dirt for it, and then mockingly kept lowering the price.

She focused on the papers, forcing herself to read them. The caravan had been disbanded years ago, just after her mom had died. The traders had all gone their separate ways, falling in with other caravans, mainly Crimson Caravans, or just simply retiring. An idle thought popped into her head.

She had lived in the Courtyard all of her life. Her father had always told her it wasn't safe to go outside it. Well fuck him. Half-baked plans about forming a second Cassidy Caravans flowed into her head, each one fueled mainly by spite, weariness, and alcohol.

The owner of a Firm Stiff One had offered to let her keep her stock if she would sell to him by the end of the month. She would take him up on that offer. She would sleep on it, come up with a better plan in the morning (probably) and use the money to buy a couple of Brahmin and hire some guards, then set out to find a place to sell her inventory. New Reno seemed like a good first stop.

She grinned widely as she took one last sip, idly registering that she had somehow gotten through half of it, and spun drunkenly on the spot. She staggered towards the mattress behind the bar that acted as her bed. "Well, dad. So fucking long and…thanks for all the fish," she summered incomprehensibly as her wits failed her and she fell forward.

XXXXX

She groaned as she woke. She was lying in an unfamiliar bed, sandwiched between two different people. A man and a woman, a married couple by the looks of them, and both of them were bare ass naked. As was she. "Oh fuck, please tell me I swallowed," she muttered to herself as she got out of bed.

Her head throbbed with the tell-tale aches of a hangover as she rubbed her temples, trying to remember how she had got here. She remembered coming to Shady Sands to offload her inventory. Her last run hadn't gone very well. She had been hauling munitions, ideally to sell to the NCR, but everything had gone wrong. Her men had wanted more money, the price of the bullets had gone up, and the NCR had come into a large surplus that rendered the need for bullets to be minimal.

There was also the problem of the NCR-Brotherhood war dying down. She had thought that it would've been an easy sell. Selling bullets to a nation that was at war was as easy as it came. It's just a shame that the NCR officially wasn't at war anymore. She had barely broken even with the discount she had been forced to give, which made the long trek seem utterly pointless.

Things had gotten a little fuzzy after that. The man was the mayor of Shady Sands and his wife was a prostitute…or had it been the other way around? Either way, she had gotten into a shouting match with whichever one was the mayor about getting her money's worth for the ammo. In the end, she had managed to get enough to make it so that she wouldn't starve, after three hours of shouting and cussing herself hoarse. Then everything went dark.

"So long as I didn't prostitute myself as part of the deal," she grumbled to no one in particular, idly sorting out her clothes from the random, disjointed piles that dotted the ground. She had no idea what to do now. Her plan had been to buy new cargo with her profits. Preferably something that was in high demand everywhere else. Medicine had been a good bet, but now she had a pretty good feeling that wouldn't work. She didn't have the money to get nearly enough stock.

"Oh fuck, medicine!" she swore, remembering. Pulling her paints out from underneath the mayor/male prostitute, she dug through the pockets. She felt a trio of syringes, pulling them out one by one. Only one of them had any of the life, extending drug that she had been taking for the longest time. She hissed as she slid the needle insider herself, pressing down on the plunger, trying not to wake her fuck buddies.

She slid down onto the floor, letting the syringe roll across the ground. She had forgotten all about her medication. That had been the last of it. She had been planning on buying more with her earnings, but that clearly was going to happen. Could she risk sliding into the red to get more? Or could she go without?

Her heart beat sluggishly in her chest. She placed her hand over it, feeling the lub-dub movements as it throbbed within her. Her father had commonly complained about chest pains. She didn't get them nearly as much as he had, usually only when she had gone off her medication. It had been happening more and more often, though. At first, the pain didn't appear until three months after each dose of medication. Slowly, that had eroded away. A few days went with each syringe, until it had gotten to the point where only a single month had to pass before she started feeling pain.

Her father had never shown the pain that he felt in an overly physical way. He had just complained about it a lot. Still, Cass couldn't help but wonder how he had been able to function when his heart hurt like that, and hurt so often. Maybe it hadn't bothered him the way it bothered her. Or maybe he had been faking it all along, to garner sympathy points. She doubted that, her father didn't seem to care what people had thought of him, otherwise he would've tried to actually be a father.

She slid rested her head against the wall. The logical part of her brain told her that she had lived a fairly long life for a wastelander, and that it was a major achievement to have made it to her 30s. That any days after that was a treat that most people wouldn't get, no matter how few they were. The less logical part of her brain told the logical part to shut the fuck up. That death was still death, and that she wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

She gave a small sniff. She wasn't going to cry over this. She had gotten that all out of her system years ago. Many a night she had cried herself to sleep during her teenage years and her early 20s. The tears had dried up before too long. Deep down, she had accepted that this condition would kill her one day. Be it tomorrow or twenty years from now. She knew it would and that there was no way around it. It still scared her sometimes.

Getting her feet, she gave her head a shake. She would live longer if she could make enough money to keep up a steady supply of medicine. She had to scrap every last vial of it. Slowly, she pulled on her pants before fishing around for the rest of the clothes. She wasn't staying for breakfast.

XXXXX

She led her head slump onto the bar in front of her. Gone. All of it gone. Just when she was starting to turn a steady profit, it was all gone. Burned to ash. She could understand killing the guards, that was part of the process when it came to attacking caravans, but they had had burnt everything. The cargo, the Brahmin, even the bodies of the guards. All of it vaporized, most likely by laser weapons. All of it gone.

"If you're too drunk to walk out of here, I'm gonna have to stop serving you," the tanned woman from behind the bar said. "Buy a cola if you want to keep drinking." Cass flipped her off, not looking up. "Yeah, yeah, take it up with Jackson," she said disinterestedly.

Cass grumbled into the stained and chipped wood. She tried to swear, but couldn't decide on ass or fuck, and the result was "asuk." The bartender didn't respond. Without the distraction of a conversation, Cass let her thoughts wander. She had turned thirty-seven last month. Thirty-seven. She had heard a NCR quack said that the average person in the Post-War world lived fifty-two years. That was without taking infant mortality into account. On average, she had fifteen years left. Or something like that. Fucking numbers.

She grasped for her glass and brought it to her mouth, only to find it empty. She thought about trying to convince bartender that she could handle another shot, but knew that it would be a futile battle. The booze helped her. Her heart medication was a rare commodity nowadays. She could get three a year if she was lucky. Her heart hurt all the time when she wasn't taking it. The alcohol didn't stop the pain, but it took the edge off. It also helped her not think about the fifteen years thing, and how that was most likely for healthier people.

"This seat taken?" Lifting her head an inch off the table, she saw a redheaded woman in lime-green combat armor standing next to her. She vaguely remembered seeing her a couple of weeks ago, in this very bar. She had been wearing a Vault 21 jump-suit then, and there had been a couple of noticeable scars on her temple, her hair around them having been shaved. The scars were still there, but it looked like her hair had grown back in since then. Cass made an idle gesture and the woman sat down.

"Sarsaparilla please," she said, taking out a handful of NCR bills. "Got too much of this stuff taking up space, mind as well unload it. Keep the change" The bartender took the bills without complaint and slid the woman a bottle of Sunset Sarsaparilla. Taking the cap off, the woman glanced at the underbelly of it. "A star? Well, that makes number seventeen," she said, pocketing it.

Cass snorted. "You honestly believe that bullshit? What, you think old Festus is going to pop up and give you…I don't fucking know, anything?" The woman had been smiling, but it slid off her face as she looked Cass in the eye. She took a sip of her drink.

"I went up to Crimson Caravans like you suggested. Did a bit of work for them," she said cryptically. "Lady in charge made me an offer. She offered me a good bit of money to buy Cassidy Caravans from you."

Cass snorted. This had to be a joke. She had told this lady about what had happened to her caravan the last time she had been through. This was a cruel joke, although a kinda funny one, she had to admit. "And does she know what happened to it?"

"Oh, she knows," the woman said, idly spinning her bottle. "She knows damn well. A little too well for my comfort. I pressed her a little, and I learned something rather interesting. I thought everything being destroyed in your caravan was something the Fiends did. Power Gangers, highway men, or Legion would've taken the supplies, and none of them would've used energy weapons. But it turns out it was someone else. Her."

Cass was paying full attention now. Her back was stiff in her chair, and she felt as if there wasn't a single drop of booze in her. "I'm not really in the mood to be jerked around, so if you're pulling the wool over my eyes, I'm gonna be pissed."

The woman put her hand up. "I'm not in the business of peddling lies. Crimson Caravan? They're dirty. Damn dirty. Another job they wanted me to do was to steal blueprints from the Gun Runners. You know, those people that sell a couple thousand guns to the NCR every year. So I had a thought." She unholstered a .44 magnum from her side, holding it up tp the light.

Cass looked at it. It was Gun Runner model, there weren't any other guns like that one in the Mojave. Chrome and shiny, not a scratch on it, it looked brand new. There was a very good chance that it actually was brand new. Sliding the chambers out, she examined all six bullets before slapping it back in, giving it a good spin. "I don't like people like them. People who step on others and try to profit off of it. So I had a thought. Instead of taking their money, I thought I'd help you get even with them."

Cass reached up to her back, feeling where her double barreled shotgun was hanging from her back. "What did you have in mind?" The woman grinned. "Let's talk about that when you've sobered up a bit." She reached out her hand. "Christina Foley."

Slowly, gingerly, Cass took it. "Rose of Sharon Cassidy." Crimson Caravans had destroyed her last source of income. The source of her medicine. Even if they hadn't destroyed her caravan, those had become infrequent and scattered. Barring a radical change, she was on borrowed time. She had no family to go back to. She didn't have much of a future ahead of her. And now she had an opportunity to take an organization infinitely bigger than her with little chance of success.

Why the fuck not? If it came down dying in bed or dying in a gunfight, she would take the opportunity to take out a few limp-dick pussies with her. She and Christina got up and left the bar. Cass smiled. It was funny. Her life was possibly shorter than ever right now, and yet she couldn't remember the last time that she had felt this alive.

XXXXX

Author's Note: For the record, the "Adult comic" John Cassidy was named after was Preacher. It was kind of funny to me to have a man admit to his daughter that he was named after a comic while I knew that that comic has a character named arseface.

Well, this is my first monthly one-shot, sponsored by . A story about the origins of Sharon of Rose Cassidy won the vote. Sorry to those who didn't get to win. There's always next month. Voting for the second one-shot will open for all Patrons on the 1st of November.

I'd like to thank my Patrons SuperFeatherYoshi, xXNanamiXx, and Ryan Van Schaack for their amazing support.


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